Feb 26, 2010

I know these are another one of those cheesy slide-deck articles - but the HuffPo recently posted decks for The 9 Worst Features About Google Buzz and The Best Features About Google Buzz. I found the rankings, especially of the worst things, quite interesting. The number #1 worst thing wasn't privacy but "No Chronological Feeds". It seems that in its attempt to make aggregating and filtering social media content a personalized experience, Google's launch version of Buzz fell short. Buzz did well to integrate with web technologies and offer nice interfaces to pictures, entering endless status posts, or navigate content. However, Buzz failed to make it a useful for individual preferences like privacy, collapsing comments, or creating lists. There are some contradictions (or seemingly) between the best and worst - such as Finding People to Follow ends up on both lists. The devil is in the details and as with all social tools the number of people participating. I suspect finding people will get easier if more people use Buzz.

Facebook in 2006 filed for a patent covering ‘the feed,’ as it is known among the tech world. That patent was just granted. Something to note, Facebook filed this before feeds were in vogue, before some social darlings were even born.

Next Web cites what the patent covers and has a link to the full patent. As the author points out, it remains to be seen what Facebook will do - likely something that involves royalties - but it's "probably going to get ugly."

How feeds are able to help people filter, sort, and keep up with multiple information channels is very timely. I recently linked to a Clay Shirky lecture on re-framing the information overload conundrum. Feeds seem to be part of the answer, witnessed by the recent launching of Google Buzz - despite it's not-ready-for-prime-time functionality. Considering these trends the timing of this patent award is uncanny.

I've found little commentary in the regular media but some bloggers have jumped in. All Facebook has some interesting details on the patent - that they are continuing to update - such as the patent does not include status feeds. I can hear the collective "Phew" coming from Twitter.

FriendFeed is down right now. It has been down for the past 30 minutes or so. Sadly, that’s not news anymore. Not because, like Twitter of old, it’s down all the time, but rather, because it seems like no one really uses it anymore. Case in point, it’s been down for over 30 minutes and there are maybe 50 total tweets about it (and several are from the same users).

Feb 25, 2010

The Ace 100 manual goes on to describe three categories of crooks in the computer world. The first category is “Them,” the computer salespeople who overhype their products with advertising gimmicks. The second category is “You.” Franklin isn’t actually calling you a crook, but they say that software manufacturers will treat you like one:

Feb 1, 2010

Some of it is going to be around re-thinking social norms...when you feel yourself getting too much information, I think the discipline is not to say to yourself 'what's happened to the information?', but rather 'what filter just broke? What was I relying on before that stopped functioning?'